This four-storey rectangular tower house, measuring 8.2 by 12.2 metres, dates from the mid-16th century and offers a fascinating glimpse into the complex history of Clare’s Gaelic nobility and their English successors. Built from roughly coursed limestone with distinctive base battering, the tower retains much of its original character, including sixteen cut-stone windows of varying designs; round-headed, flat-headed and ogee-headed examples; and two particularly fine loops featuring foliate patterns in their spandrels.

The castle’s history reads like a medieval soap opera of inheritance disputes and political manoeuvring. First mentioned in 1551 when Murrough O’Brien, 1st Earl of Thomond, willed it to his son Teige, the property remained in O’Brien hands until the early 17th century. After Turlough O’Brien’s death in 1584, the castle passed to his three daughters, with Honoria eventually securing ownership through her marriage to Richard Wingfield, ancestor of the Lords Powerscourt. The Wingfields held the castle for centuries, though not without drama; following Honoria’s death in 1650 and her grandson Conor O’Brien’s death the following year, a family conflict erupted over ownership. Cromwellian troops garrisoned the castle in 1652, and by the 19th century it had passed firmly into Powerscourt hands, with Eugene Curry noting around 1839 that it had been inhabited within living memory.

The tower’s interior reveals the sophisticated planning typical of late medieval Irish tower houses. A pointed-arch doorway in the east wall leads to a lobby with a spiral staircase ascending through all floors. Each level contains a large western chamber and smaller northeastern room, with stone vaults over the first and third floors. The second floor housed the main hall, complete with a cut-stone fireplace flanked by an aumbry, its simple mantle supported by angular corbels. Throughout the building, numerous aumbries, garderobes and loops demonstrate the careful attention paid to both comfort and defence. Though a large adjoining house was demolished sometime after 1910, leaving only its ghostly roofline imprinted on the castle’s south wall, the tower itself underwent renovation in the late 1990s and remains an evocative monument to five centuries of Clare history.